Introduction Lennon-McCartney and Corpus

The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership was one of the most successful musical cooperations of all time. In the early days of the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney would often collaborate on songs extensively. As teenagers, they had made an agreement that they would both be credited with all songs written by either of them, whether jointly or separately. This is why all Beatles songs written by either Lennon or McCartney are officially credited to “Lennon-McCartney”. Later on it became increasingly common for them to write songs separately.

In an interview for Playboy Magazine in 1980, Lennon said the following about his songwriting partnership with McCartney:

[Paul] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes. There was a period when I thought I didn’t write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock ‘n’ roll. But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs—“In My Life”, or some of the early stuff, “This Boy”—I was writing melody with the best of them.

I would be curious to see whether Lennon’s characterization of the differences between his and McCartney’s songwriting styles is accurate. The spotify API provides some features by which this potential difference could be explored. For example, the valence and energy features of the AudioFeaturesObject could be useful.

For this course, I will compare Beatles songs written (predominantly) by Paul McCartney to those written (predominantly) by John Lennon. To this end I created two playlists on Spotify. One playlist for the McCartney songs and one for the Lennon songs. I used the this webpage as a guide to determine which song was written by whom. The corpus contains 142 songs in total (70 written by Paul McCartney and 72 written by John Lennon).

Paul McCartney once said about his songwriting relationship with John Lennon:

He’d write ‘Strawberry Fields,’ I’d go away and write ‘Penny Lane’ … to compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition.

This seems to imply that the two songwriters influenced each other’s writing to an extent. Therefore, I expect that the songs they wrote seperately during their time in the Beatles are probably more similar than the songs they wrote for their solo albums. To investigate this hypothesis, I will also use the first 2 solo albums by each artist to compare the differences in their early solo work to the differences in their writing styles when they were both in The Beatles.

First solo albums:

Paul McCartney:

John Lennon:

Los Beatles Se Despiden GIF from Adios GIFs

Valence VS Energy Beatles

Valence vs Energy Solo

Tempo histograms

Valence Of Beatles Albums Over Time

Valence Beatles Albums John vs Paul

Chromagram John Lennon - Tomorrow Never Knows

Chromagram Paul Mccartney - Martha My Dear

What is the structure of ‘We Can Work It Out’ (chroma and timbre features)

Keygram Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey

Tempogram

The Beatles sound: solo albums compared to Bleatles albums

Classification

What are the most important features for classification according to Random Forest?

3d plot Beatles songs most important features.

3d plot solo songs most important features.

Concluding remarks

John Lennon and Paul McCartney influenced each other’s songwriting significantly when they were in The Beatles together. Geoff Emerick, who served as the principal engineer for EMI on several later Beatles albums, realized that the two operated as a single creative unit while they were in The Beatles. “Even from the earliest days, I always felt that the artist was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not the Beatles.”, he wrote in his memoir.

This is particularly interesting, because their personalities were so starkly different. Emerick said the following about this difference: “Paul was meticulous and organized: he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d hurriedly scribbled ideas on. Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing. Paul usually knew exactly what he wanted and would often take offense at criticism; John was much more thick-skinned and was open to hearing what others had to say. In fact, unless he felt especially strongly about something, he was usually amenable to change.”

These differences in personality started to show more in their solo work. Surprisingly, John Lennon started writing a lot of low-valence, low-energy songs, which is the complete opposite of how he described himself during the time of The Beatles: “There was a period when I thought I didn’t write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock ‘n’ roll.” McCartney’s solo work is more similar to his work in the Beatles, in terms of fetures from the Spotify API